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"When that mail arrived gently asking you about coffee, you didn’t answer the way you answered the prior five similar mails with a brief, “Really happy here. Le

by fsloth 11y ago

"When that mail arrived gently asking you about coffee, you didn’t answer the way you answered the prior five similar mails with a brief, “Really happy here. Let’s get a drink some time!” You think you thought Hmmm… what the hell. It can’t hurt. What you actually thought or realized was:...(miserable past experiences)" No, that's not me. When someone asks me for a coffee in these circumstances I go out of curiosity - it gives me an opportunity to probe the career market in an indepth way and lets me upkeep contacts. I'm happy where I work but I do need to know my market worth and what the job market is like just in case the management three layers up decides to do something which affects my position negatively. I'm a neurotic about things that just need to work and my familys financial situation - for which I'm greatly responsible - is one of those things. Networking and flirting with other employers is not treachery, it's common sense. Also, I claim there is a hell of a statistic bias going here - I bet he does not collect this information from the people who are staying and which parts of this heuristic dataset actually explain why the people who left, left. One would need to compare these factoids with the population who stayed first. I understand the need for rules of thumb of course - just as long one remembers they mighy be completely wrong.

hibikir 11y ago
One thing is networking, and another is to do onsite visits that are clear recruiting pitches. I have a friend that, since she's become relatively well known and travels a lot, gets a lot of those recruiting pitches. Has that made her happier? Nope: It's not hard to see the grass greener on the other side when everyone around you is doing their best to make things seem amazing. She's never sat in the same place for more than a year in the last 6, so she's not really had time to leave her mark anywhere. Not one major work accomplishment in years. And now, the minute anything starts to look difficult, she gives up, and jumps ship again. It's like dumping partners after 4 dates: Never having enough time to building anything remotely meaningful. When the honeymoon phase ends, she's gone. In her case, her public face is what keeps people coming back. But really small stays are a red flag. In a company, it's not as if you need people to stay for 10 years to be successful, but it's hard to go anywhere when 10 months is already considered a big tenure. At the same time though, I also worry about having a core of people that never leave. A few jobs ago, I attended a 15 year celebration. 15! Straight out of school, to architect, without having ever worked anywhere else. Management never figured out that those 15+ year tenures were the reason many new senior hires were coming in and leaving quickly: Why would you work at a place that has such a long standing, very tenured network of people that trust each other more than anyone new, and that they'll never leave? You better love those people, because they are the technical ceiling of what you'll get.
- fsloth 11y ago
  "Why would you work at a place that has such a long standing, very tenured network of people that trust each other more than anyone new" In general, trust and longevity (in addition to a smallish size) are desirable qualities in a technical team of experts. The product itself signals then the technical merits of the team. There is the 'expert beginner' idea that it's easy to stagnate and entrench oneself in a dysfunctional organization. A long lasting team of expert beginners is an antipattern of course. But the way to get a high quality team is not by churning through hires - it's by successfull hiring.

by fsloth 11y ago

hibikir 11y ago

One thing is networking, and another is to do onsite visits that are clear recruiting pitches. I have a friend that, since she's become relatively well known and travels a lot, gets a lot of those recruiting pitches. Has that made her happier? Nope: It's not hard to see the grass greener on the other side when everyone around you is doing their best to make things seem amazing. She's never sat in the same place for more than a year in the last 6, so she's not really had time to leave her mark anywhere. Not one major work accomplishment in years. And now, the minute anything starts to look difficult, she gives up, and jumps ship again. It's like dumping partners after 4 dates: Never having enough time to building anything remotely meaningful. When the honeymoon phase ends, she's gone. In her case, her public face is what keeps people coming back. But really small stays are a red flag. In a company, it's not as if you need people to stay for 10 years to be successful, but it's hard to go anywhere when 10 months is already considered a big tenure. At the same time though, I also worry about having a core of people that never leave. A few jobs ago, I attended a 15 year celebration. 15! Straight out of school, to architect, without having ever worked anywhere else. Management never figured out that those 15+ year tenures were the reason many new senior hires were coming in and leaving quickly: Why would you work at a place that has such a long standing, very tenured network of people that trust each other more than anyone new, and that they'll never leave? You better love those people, because they are the technical ceiling of what you'll get.

fsloth 11y ago
"Why would you work at a place that has such a long standing, very tenured network of people that trust each other more than anyone new" In general, trust and longevity (in addition to a smallish size) are desirable qualities in a technical team of experts. The product itself signals then the technical merits of the team. There is the 'expert beginner' idea that it's easy to stagnate and entrench oneself in a dysfunctional organization. A long lasting team of expert beginners is an antipattern of course. But the way to get a high quality team is not by churning through hires - it's by successfull hiring.